The success of an organization largely depends on the way it leverages business intelligence. BI is a binding thread to the transformation of enterprises by providing analyzed data as information to key decision makers. Given that all enterprises can’t have adequate business analysts in handling the BI, a new concept self-service BI developed somewhere around 2012. This is when non-traditional BI vendors entered the market and provided a license to download the pre-built software that allows end-users to use the tool without any prior knowledge and understanding about BI concepts.
Benefits of Self-service BI
Increased Productivity: Enterprises that embraced self-service BI have reported a steep increase in the employee productivity. An article published in the Information Weekly stands as a testimony to the same. The article reported that self-service BI enables end-users to swiftly respond to the changes and make necessary corrections, which minimized turnaround time. According to Starfleet Research’s survey, at least 93% of respondents said that self-service BI was instrumental in boosting the productivity.
Eliminate the Dependency on IT Team: Managers often ask IT departments to send across some crucial reports. It would obviously consume sometime for the IT department to look at the request, prepare or pull out the report and then send across the same. With the help of self-service BI, any business user can get a 360-degree view of the report in real-time with the help of login credentials. This will also help your IT and finance departments to focus on more value driven iniatives instead of generating reports daily.
Data Driven Decisions: No more the intuition or the arguments when it comes to making decisions. Self-service BI provides the required insights through which a business user can analyze and make purely data-driven concrete decisions. According to a survey by Oxford Economics, at least 55% of respondents said that the decisions taken in their enterprises were data driven. They yielded higher profits when compared to previous fiscals where decisions were judgments and taken in real-time without any analytics.
Cost-Effective: Since self-service BI can be availed as a pay-as-you-go service, enterprises will shell out only the amount of the service it utilizes. It is undoubtedly less expensive on contrary to appointing a business analyst and depend on him for data insights. Also, it’s highly scalable, as in enterprises can scale up or down depending on their workforce, which will help them cut the costs. With zero requirements of any architecture or database, self-service BI is surely a meritorious option for all the enterprises.
Disadvantages of Self-service BI:
Just like how a coin has two sides, self-service BI comes bundled with pros and cons. Now that we have learned the merits of it, let us also find out its negative shades.
- Lack of training: The business users should be adequately trained as to how to use self-service BI failing which they might be ending up taking decisions that prove dearer to enterprises
- Reluctance: Not all employees are open to learning something that’s newly introduced. Their reluctance can take a toll on the company’s financial health
- Limitations of business users: Not all business users have the required skill set to work on BI no matter how experienced they are. Handing over self-service BI to an over-confident person will obviously yield darker results
- Security: Security is often a million-dollar question both internally and externally. If you hand over the login credentials to someone who’s not honest, he might leak the data to other enterprises. Also, if the service provider is not competent enough, the chances that your data getting leaked will be high
Time to rethink: According to Research and Markets forecast, the future of self-service BI is bright. The report predicted that the global expenditure spent on self-service BI is sure to double by 2021 and touch $7.31Bn. However, self-service BI is taking a chance. It’s tossing the coin and awaiting the heads. Your business users will have the complete power of taking organizational decisions that are not advisable.
Conclusion: If you are looking for an alternate for self-service BI, Techwave is here to help you out. We provide in-depth analytics for you so that your decision making will be a cakewalk. Get in touch with us today at info@techwave.net.